Merus

Oh man, shilling for sponsors. I will talk a lot about Zombies Run because it is well worth knowing about. So there are a lot of apps that purport to motivate you by including zombies but Zombies Run by Six to Start is the nice one. The missions are all unique and fully voiced, written by an actual writer so they very quickly evolve from 'oh no there are zombies' to 'how exactly do we continue grinding on' and a little bit of 'how did this happen in the first place'. There's one mission early on in Season One where things go badly towards the end, and the next mission is just the radio operator holding a vigil, hoping that you can hear him. There's another mission deep in Season One that I won't spoil, but it is genuinely devastating. It has elegant gamification to it, as well - the thing that pulls you through is the fact that it's a radio drama instead of expecting you to get excited about the possibility of zombies. As you run, you gather supplies that you can use in a simple base-building thing. It's not trying to shower you with badges and dangling carrots or anything gross like that, which means your intrinsic motivation stays more or less intact. They have a 'train to 10k' mode, and a separate app that does a couch-to-5k program that includes stretches and sections that are flexible run/walk sections, rather than the stricter run 3 minutes/walk 5 minutes/ run 3 minutes stuff most popular C25K apps have. I first heard about them because most of the people involved are ARG people from way back - they all worked at Mindcandy, back when it ran the ARG Perplex City (before it pivoted and made all the money with Moshi Monsters).

Blambo's post was a gooood post. It was supposed to read as petulant and hypocritical, because coming into a contentious topic like this and acting like the font of wisdom needs to be undercut by a little obvious hypocrisy. It doesn't sound like it made me come across as less of an asshole. I'm sorry for that. Also no-one except for Australians and New Zealanders care about what Australia does wrong, which is why I don't usually talk about it. I haven't had much luck having a discussion with the nuances of my culture on the internet, particularly when other people in the conversation were assuming that we were living under the yoke of tyranny because violent games kept getting rated RC. I do not think badly of you, but I've been burnt too many times.

haha staying out of this was the right choice I do want to bring this up, though, because it has nothing to do with collard greens: It's funny that you mention Gorm and Bjorn here* because if I take that quote out of context, I'd assume you were talking about Chris and Argobot. This is fine, because: I think that, with things like this, we bristle at people who make different choices because we take it as a condemnation of our own beliefs, and it's actually worse, not better, when we've been thoughtful about those beliefs. It's the same thing that makes people mad about vegans, or people who don't watch TV. I doubt that anyone here is intending to lecture, more that, well obviously there's a disagreement here and so if we post our entire chain of reasoning to this point then we can work out what the differences are (which is also why when these arguments get contentious, they also get really, really long). It's a curiously robotic form of argument**, and as I think we've proved here, it's not particularly persuasive because people don't, by and large, hold positions rooted in logic. There's no one fact that's going to shatter someone's beliefs, because they're not dependent on facts, especially around social justice which is almost always a horrifically wicked problem with no clear takeaways or places where people can definitely find common agreement if they're not starting from similar places. I think some people here worry about being the person who everyone takes as silently judging them, and I'm happy to tell you that ship has fuckin' sailed. Being that person is very rarely about what you do or think, and much more about how others take your actions as a reflection upon themselves. I've been relentlessly bullied by people who take it as a personal affront that they're not the smartest goddamn person in the room. If I manage to realise that's what they're doing, all I feel for them is sadness. How sad is it that your self-identity is so fragile that it can't handle a change in the weather. The only thing I'm in control of is my own behaviour, really, and I'd prefer to be as genuine as possible and remember that no matter what I do I can't have everyone like me. I'd rather do what I can do, and embrace the fact that it still won't be enough. * and minimise Blambo ** I wonder if this is rooted in how none of us have learned rhetoric at school. We argue, as a civilisation, a lot more than we used to even twenty years ago, because most of the time we met people who shared our experiences. Unless we were in a college dorm; college dorms are infamous for their rambling, insipid arguments. We seem to have farmed that out to the rest of the internet.

Yeah, there's where it gets dubious. Show X doesn't have to be in the same continuity as St. Elsewhere most of the time, and there's nothing saying that in the autistic boy universe, St. Elsewhere doesn't exist as a fictional show that he expanded inside his own head.

Haha, this won't end well I'm going to do something else because I'm pretty sure this discussion is rooted in a part of the American experience I have no familiarity with. You people have Olive Gardens and shit. Your relationship to food is super different to ours so while we genuinely had waves of immigrants set up in Australia, start restaurants and sell a version of their cultural dishes palatable to Australian tastes, that experience isn't relevant to America where you guys went for melting pot rather than cultural shift.

Australia has had a long history of terrible Mexican food because we haven't had a lot of Mexican. We're starting to get some now. But there's a point to be made that people who know what, say, a kebab's supposed to taste like are the people who should be making kebabs. In the US there's a racial component because of course there is, but I'm sure as shit not opening a kebab shop without having someone Lebanese on hand to make sure you're getting it right.

This goofy Australian consumer affairs/hammy sketch comedy show has Problems with ancestry.com:

I'm also not arguing that they don't have good reason to think it's a good idea, it's just that the peculiarities of this kind of PvP means that asymmetric multiplayer is much more fragile than it is in, say, Starcraft. They may have a cunning plan to counter this, I don't know, but I know that this kind of PvP is extremely difficult to get right: I know of at least five games that have tried this style of PvP, more if you count games with only two factions, and I think there's really only been one, maybe two, unqualified successes. (I've never understood the argument that not having to balance for PvE makes things easier. If you're balancing for PvP, properly, you're considering a lot of different scenarios, and those scenarios change depending on the balancing decisions you make. If you're already committed to PvP balancing, PvE balancing isn't much more of a burden because you're only adding a handful of new scenarios. Adding a new class is much more disruptive to balance and yet people don't seem to find that a problem. Well okay, I guess I do understand the argument, I just think it's ignorant.)

So my housemate built a Super Nintendo out of a Raspberry Pi. Because my housemate is an electrical engineer, this meant he: Is using the original power brick for the SNES instead of replacing the power plug (the AV out did get replaced with a HDMI out), is using original controllers and controller ports, and he wrote his own firmware to detect button presses instead of running it through a USB port and potentially dropping keystrokes, re-jigged the power switch so that it would shut down the machine instead of cutting the power, re-compiled an emulator that would support Yoshi's Island onto the Raspberry Pi, wrote his own interface for loading ROMs, including a search It's basically a magic SNES. As far as we know, no-one's ever done a more thorough fit-out, so he's planning on writing up what he did and posting a guide online.

I think we've proved by now that just because both extremes are complaining doesn't mean you've found the happy medium. I'm willing to wait and see, but if one of the factions gets it into their head that they're underpowered, there's going to be no dislodging that. Every nerf will be the developer vendetta; every buff, something they should have done a long time ago.

I am looking forward to the inevitable complaints that the other faction is overpowered. One of the key reasons why asymmetric balance works is that players can play as the faction/character that beat them, and discover that they're not overpowered after all, they just suck at the game. I think, if you're locked to a faction, that's going to be hard to achieve. Also I don't know how they're going to manage keeping the teams even. Normally three-way fights eventually end up with one faction permanently locked out.

This is relevant because Denmark is spinning up a series of experiments on how the basic income will work. They're going to require political approval, and there's constitutional hurdles to cross, but the expectation is that for two years they're going to test out varying proposals of how a basic income would work (negative income tax, unifying social service payments, just paying everyone) across an entire community, and they'll see what happens next.

You will not convince me that the N64 Memory Pak was not a peripheral, but you are welcome to try.

GameGate strikes me as a reactionary movement, which is why it seems vaguely conservative but doesn't really cohere into anything. The comparison with the religious right is surprisingly apt: the religious right is largely a political movement that uses evangelical Christianity as a cover for various reactionary political goals (never mind that evangelical Christianity is itself morally bankrupt, being devised as a way to invent a flavour of Christianity that could justify owning slaves). Their stance on abortion, for instance, was deliberately inverted in the 70s.

So Australia has different requirements for men and women in the defence force; their reasoning is that it's far more important to ensure diversity in the units than it is to ensure combat readiness, because generally if the Australian defence force is getting into a fight where combat readiness will decide the fight, someone has fucked up. (The army, in particular, aims to have an exact demographic match to wider Australia, which has meant they've had to tackle the question of why certain groups of people aren't willing to join the army.) However, our defence force is a relatively small and well-trained force, as opposed to the US which is much larger but not as rigorous.

I don't think Nintendo needs to abandon their withered technology hardware design - they've had many more hits with it than misses, and their ability to ship hardy products cheaply is because the 'withered technology' approach is also used for things like controller buttons, power design and packaging. Nintendo routinely ship amazing controllers because their controllers are built on cheap hardware and great engineering. Nothing I've heard suggests Nintendo's problem is with hardware, except for that one guy that complained that the Wii was just two Gamecubes duct-taped together, which was sort of ignorant because most every computer these days is made up of older computers stuck together. Their problem has been with development tools and building the ecosystem, and as far as I can tell, that's never been properly addressed. As for this patent: there's been an idea kicking around for a while for modular smartphones. I never thought it was a great idea because people's preferences change when they're required to get things piecemeal (i.e. no-one would ever buy a phone camera if it didn't come with the phone) and this feels like Nintendo going for broke on the peripherals front, which has worked out approximately never.

TouchArcade discuss how the most successful developers on the Apple TV are making, at best, hundreds of dollars per day. It's not surprising; the Apple TV seemed a half-baked games platform, as the audience that are looking for big-screen gaming experiences probably aren't the people who play the games most successful on iOS, and Apple's signalling is that this isn't a serious platform for people like Blizzard, who are doing very well out of Hearthstone on portable devices.

It's entirely possible that NX will be built on existing hardware, so once the port's happened, an NX release would be trivial.

It looks like we've got, at most, three people, which I don't think is enough to run a game at this rate.

We can help New Zealand with that so long as someone can convince Cory Bernadi to get in a postbag though for real I'm pretty sure we just had our right-wing reactionary freakout a couple of years early, just early enough that when Daesh came down the pipes we were collectively waking up to ourselves. The US is currently dealing with Trump, who's crossed over from amusingly deranged to actual fascist, and Europe's electing Actual Nazis to parliament. Tony Abbott, whose malice was only eclipsed by his incompetence, doesn't seem so bad in comparison.

I can't actually remember a lot of the guilds I joined. I remember three old guilds: in Puzzle Pirates, I was one of the founders of Panthalassa, which is a name I like, but didn't really go anywhere because it ended up being a super-guild of notable players more or less on their way out. In WoW, my best guild, the Stoppable Force. It ruined me for other guilds, and when it fell apart I tried transferring to an Australian server and never found anything nearly as good. In GW2, I was in Fifty Shades of Bear for a time, and sadly they were not fun-loving or light-hearted, and by the time I realised I had nothing in common, they were basically planning on leaving the server anyway.

I think what's been better is the image the Israel Post ran of Trump: him holding his arm out at a podium, at a 45 degree angle. It's a great photo of him that just so happens to also depict him as Hitler, so I think it's going to be one for the ages.

New Zealand once again well behind Australia. Having government ministers be dangerously incompetent is so 2014

Trust me, it's better this way.

There's actually a third reason remakes tend to happen: revisiting an existing setting that you've decided has to stay the same, but making significant changes to it as you go. JRPGs actually have a few of these - Final Fantasy 3 and 4 have seen ground-up remakes, as have the SNES Dragon Quests. Outside of JRPGs, Metroid Zero Mission is one of these.